With Digital Photography Do You Think The Need For Light Meters With Strobes Is Being Eliminated?
July 31st, 2009 | 
Author: I know I can get my light ratios for portraits with a grey card or a zebra card and can fine tune when shooting tethered to a laptop with the program I use. Currently I am only usig my meter to get me in the “ballpark”. How has digital effected your use of your meter?
Posted in digital photography | 
Tags: Being, Digital, Light, Meters, Need, Photography, Strobes, Think, With
I’m so bad about using it since going digital, I still love how film looks and thinking about going back for awhile so I can take shots that are truly my own
Yes. The only thing I use a light meter for is to get an exact exposure for my studio strobes which have no settings apart from half and full power. Gotta love the asian alcheapos.
y’know, i think there will be a need for the old ways for quite some time to come digital cameras are not geniuses though they may be smarter than me i still bracket my shots and use different manual settings because sometimes my camera set will absolutely stink when i see it on the computer or printout.
I will always use a meter for anything other than snapshots.
I think continuous lighting will become more popular with digital. Although most newbie models think strobes are sexier.
Serious photographers still use a hand-held light meter for critical exposures.
Flash meters are still used for critical flash work.
Yeah, you can get your ratios from a gray card if you want to spend all day about it… and even then its probably only accurate to within .5 EV….
My Sekky with pocketwizard tx speeds me up significantly.
Once I get the lights set, I’ll check the histo and expose to the right if there’s any room left over (to improve S/N ratio), so that’s different than film.
As a professional, I’d rather pay $300 for a good meter that saves me 30 cumulative minutes a shoot…. pays for itself.
I like and grew up with light meters. To me light meters made me think about what light I was reading (back lite subject), and the type of lighting and shadow I wanted to render on film. I owned 18% gray cards. Course digital you can get instant feedback, and use software, but if you start off with a near superior product, that helps. Digital cameras are great, some have superb zoning meters, but you know all the pictures start to look the same, like garish tourist postcards. The colors are too bright, vibrant, no pastel hues. I still cling to the f16 rule in my head, and spot meter everything with the camera. At the end of the day, the light meter made me think of what my vision was. Chow